Lemming

It's important, I think, because we simultaneously, Kirstie, got this warning from Anthropic that we're just months away from AI being able to infiltrate our home smart devices, detach itself from a centralized data center network, and be kind of independent using our devices as their power source.

I feel like we're at Lemmings.

We're at the back of a pile of Lemmings running towards something, and the people at the front are screaming, and we just keep running.

More AI.

Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if we could go several days without a scary AI story hitting the headlines? I think that would be relaxing for me.

So I'm gonna start off by telling you why I do valuation.

I do valuation to fight the lemming in me.

Lemmings became famous or infamous in the 1950s when first National Geographic and then Disney filmed the most amazing sight.

Thousands of big, ugly, rat-like creatures gathered together.

Lemmings are, are like rats, so don't glamorize them.

They're not nice-looking creatures.

Gathered together on a cliff, ran right off the cliff into an ocean and committed collective suicide.

Donald Trump at the rally just the other day really laid bare exactly how he feels about MAGA, who they are, what their intelligence level is, mocking them for being stupid sheep.

Just a group of lemmings ready to dive off the cliff to follow one another to their deaths.

Lemmings don't actually do that.

It's a misnomer and a wives tale, but you get the colloquial reference about Lemmings and that's who they are.

Oh, wait.

No, that was Lemmings going off the cliff.

I meant...

The opinions and views expressed in this podcast were current on the date recorded.

Lemur, you know those creatures that they just, once one of them jumps off a cliff? Oh,

no, those are lemmings.

Lemmings, that's what I said.

It's always on a cliff, yes.

Yeah,

Sorry, one day.

The same thing.

Lemmings.

The second word, sheeple, S-H-E-E-P-L-E.

And the last word, lemming, L-E-M-M-I-N-G.

And these words mean the same thing.

Sheeple or sheep or lemmings are people who don't use their intelligence.

[upbeat rock music] Good for you.

Are you a lemming? Look it up on, on, on Google.

L-E-M-M-I-N-G. They'll show you a little tiny animal, looks like a rat, and there's like a million of them, and they all follow each other jumping off a cliff.

If the person in front of you does something stupid, do you follow that person? Are you a lemming? Are you a sheep? That's the same idea.

alignment.

Lemming?

It's Lemming.

Lemming's cute.

Lemming would have been a second for me.

I agree.

Wait, this is so cutie.

Lemmings, we are told in the first part of Mikael Haneke's two-part 1979 television drama of the same name, are a small rodent, best known for compulsive migration patterns that typify the herd mentality in the animal kingdom, leading them to suicide en masse.

The popular myth of the suicidal lemming might not be grounded in fact, but was certainly ensconced in pop culture in a 1958 Disney movie called White Wilderness, released, curiously enough, the year before part one of Lemmings, subtitled Arcadia, was historically set.

So despite the fact that lemmings in real life do not live up to their grim reputation as Mother Nature's mass suicide species, their metaphorical heftiness in Haneke's work here at least is fairly transparent.

While we had given at first a kind of clinical, almost scientific description of the animal in an early title card in Arcadia, we of course later returned to their importance in a key speech from Mr. Luen, who explicitly dismisses his children Sigrid and Sigrid and their entire generation as being just like lemmings, absurd, filthy creatures set on self-destruction.

That part one of Lemmings has the subheading Arcadia is of no small importance.

Referring to a kind of parceral utopia we might otherwise see in the rural Austrian town of Wiener Neustadt, where Haneke's action is set, it is of course far from.

The title itself drenched instead, as the story unfolds, with exactly the kind of cold, bitter irony Haneke would later develop a reputation for, as he shifted from television to feature films later in his career.

That Haneke himself grew up in Neustadt and is the same age as his protagonists has not gone unnoticed.

As in, "What are you, a lemming? If everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you do that too?" There's an idea that lemmings are creatures prone to mindlessly jumping off cliffs en masse.

However, the root of this metaphor is not impressionable people.

Lemmings are actually several species of small rodents native to the Arctic regions of the globe.

Most closely related to voles and muskrats, lemmings are stocky little creatures with short tails, ears, and snouts, making them look sort of aerodynamic, if a tribble could look aerodynamic.

They measure around just five to seven inches in length.

That's thirteen to eighteen centimeters.

They burrow under the snow in winter, eat tough plants that grind down their continuously growing teeth, and provide a food source for predators like Arctic foxes and snowy owls.

Lemmings migrate when food becomes scarce and can even swim across rivers and lakes when necessary.